The NRA, America’s powerful gun lobby, has lauded the “brave act” of a civilian who used his handgun to kill a person who was opening fire with a semi-automatic rifle at an Indiana mall.
Another shooting in the United States. On Sunday evening Jonathan Sapirman, a young man of 20 whose motive is unknown, opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the spans of an Indiana shopping mall.
The latter killed a 30-year-old man and a couple sitting in a restaurant area and injured two before being shot dead by Elisjsha Dicken, a 22-year-old customer, who was carrying an unlicensed handgun, as recently approved.
“Many more people would have died last night if this armed and responsible citizen had not acted very quickly, two minutes after the first shots were fired,” Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said on a conference call.
The shooter, who appears to have prepared his actions after drowning his phone in the toilet and burning his computer in an oven before taking action, actually had a second assault rifle, pistol and plenty of ammunition, he revealed.
“We carry guns to defend ourselves”
The powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby immediately used this tragedy to reaffirm that arming the populace was good for public safety. “We say it again, the only way to stop a poorly armed person is to arm a good person,” he tweeted.
Another right-to-arms defense association, the CCRKBA, has embraced the same credo: “We bear arms to defend ourselves and others against criminals and the maniacs,” declared its leader Alan Gottlieb in one Message.
We’ll say it again: the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
https://t.co/grNyMOJU0g pic.twitter.com/MlwOwsbSdH— NRA (@NRA) July 18, 2022
“To put it bluntly, if guns made our security stronger, America would be the safest country in the world,” said Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign Association, which works to improve gun control.
Along the same lines, Shannon Watts, founder of the organization Moms Demand Action, reproduced graphs that placed the United States at the top of the developed world in terms of guns per capita, but also in terms of gun deaths.
According to the Small Arms Survey project, there were nearly 400 million guns in circulation among civilians in the United States in 2017, or 120 guns per 100 people. More than 24,000 people have been shot dead since the beginning of the year, including 13,000 by suicide, according to the Gun Violence Archive website, which recorded 354 shootings during that period that killed at least four people.
Several of them, at a Texas school or a supermarket frequented by African Americans, particularly shocked the country, whose elected officials in June agreed for the first time in thirty years on a – modest – gun law reform.